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How Apple's Developer Conference Grew Too Big for Its Own Developers

Steve Jobs gives his keynote at the 2008 WWDC at Moscone Center June 9, 2008. He announces the new Iphone G3.

WWDC is to Apple Developers as Coachella is to filthy hipsters: It's the year's must-attend event. Except the World Wide Developer Conference is way harder to get into. There are more than 275,000 iOS developers registered in the U.S. alone–and that doesn't count Mac developers. Only 5,000 attendees get to walk the floors every summer. Untold thousands try and fail to score tickets. Others go to desperate measures to get their hands on a conference badge. In short, it's grown into a disaster.

WWDC is a five-day long event held in San Francisco's Moscone West conference center. This year, it's taking place June 10-14. It gives Apple developers an early look at the latest additions to iOS and OS X, and provides detailed guidance through over 100 sessions led by Apple engineers. Devs can also get one-on-one time with Apple engineers at WWDC's "labs," and connect with thousands of other developers.

Last year, it sold out in two hours. Thursday, the 5,000 high-demand tickets were gobbled up in a scant two minutes.

There's good reason developers claw to get their hands on tickets each year: priceless access.

"Going to WWDC provides advantages to developers, namely in the form of access to Apple’s engineers both in casual networking capacity and in the dedicated labs for various technologies and things like user interface consulting," Daniel Jalkut, founder of Red Sweater Software, told Wired. "There is also theoretically the possibility of advance knowledge of 'secret' technological changes coming down the road." A former Apple employee, he's been attending WWDC for five years now as a third-party developer.

iOS developer Zac Bowling, who has attended three conferences but was unable to score tickets last year, finds the individual facetime invaluable. "The one-on-one sessions are unfortunately the only real way to get a lot of questions answered and bugs fixed," Bowling said. "Apple's Radar bug reporting system is a block box of ignored issues for many of us, and going to WWDC is the only time we have to get a clue and find work arounds."

Zac White, lead iOS developer at Velos Mobile, is looking forward to another form of access. "This year it's expected attendees will be able to install a pre-release version of iOS 7, and getting that in your hands before your competition is a pretty big advantage," he said.

But that access means getting tickets is no joke. Even if you're on the ball, you may still get iced.

"I've attended five WWDCs from 2007 to 2011," White told Wired. Last year he slept through Apple's early morning East Coast-time announcement and missed out. He was able to grab a ticket this year (when, for the first time, Apple announced in advance when tickets would go on sale). But just barely. "It was incredible how quickly it sold out. My co-worker sitting next to me hit purchase 20 seconds after me and got an error," explained White. "After he refreshed, it was sold out."

Ticket sales themselves are also a problem. Last year, tickets went on sale at 5:30 am Pacific with no advance warning. This year, Apple gave a day's notice that they'd be dropping. But Bowling noted that server issues and tickets that disappeared from shopping carts plagued some of his friends – even though they hopped online the second tickets went on sale. Apple support ended up calling some of the developers this happened to (including White's co-worker) in order to offer them the ticket they missed out on.

It's certainly starting to feel like WWDC has outgrown itself.

The problem is that simply expanding the conference isn't a solution. Apple could expand the event to the whole of San Francisco's Moscone Center, rather than just Moscone West. Or it could split Mac and iOS development into separate, consecutive events, giving developers the chance to attend one or both – and giving more developers a chance to snag a ticket to something in the process. But if you grow it too much, access gets diluted.

Many of the benefits of WWDC's intimacy would be lost if it accommodated more people. The one-to-one meetings with Apple engineers would likely vanish if Apple increased the conference size to, say, 25,000 attendees instead of 5,000. With a finite number of engineers at its disposal, the event is already incredibly taxing on Apple's dev teams.

"Work comes to halt for a few weeks when WWDC is coming up," says Bowling. "Apple likely wouldn't want or be able to tie up its own developers for that much more time."

Some of the best suggestions come from developers themselves. Jalkut, for example, thinks Apple should eliminate WWDC altogether and instead invest education efforts into building an even higher quality library of training videos. Colin Barrett, a San Francisco-based developer, thinks keynote-only tickets would help alleviate some of the pressures developers face in getting tickets for the entire event. Single day passes could similarly let app developers attend only the set of talks they're most interested in. Barrett also suggested a "need/greed system," which would feature a pre-sale like Apple employs now for people that "need" to go, and a lottery for "greed" folks who would like to go, but don't really care one way or the other.

Luckily, one of the biggest boons of WWDC doesn't take place inside of the conference hall at all. "The best part of WWDC for me has always been meeting developers making great things and learning from them," White said.

And this year, a number of outside events like AltWWDC are giving developers the chance to learn and mingle, even if they didn't grab one of Apple's exclusive conference tickets. If more and more of these outside-conference events start cropping up, that could be the solution to Apple's ticketing and capacity problems, transforming WWDC week into a huge networking event where the need for an actual WWDC ticket isn't really that important at all.

That would certainly please Red Sweater's Jalkut.

"The best part of WWDC for me has always been the vitality of the community and the sense of camaraderie among peers," Jalkut said. "One of the charms of WWDC used to be counting on seeing your friends from around the world, once a year, in a common setting. Now that it’s so uncertain who will be allowed to go, it’s lost something in that respect."

Jalkut boldly ended up deciding to cancel his WWDC ticket purchase. It's a move few would imitate, but sends a strong message: Something needs to change about the WWDC ticketing and attendance experience to ensure what's always made the conference successful, stays successful.